Re: Bash-4.0-rc1 available for FTP

[Nicolas]

Hello,

I ran some benchmarks of Bash 4.0-rc1. It is quite impressive! Here are the
results.
My computer is a Pentium M (running at 600 MHz for the test), running Linux
2.6.26 with libc6 version 2.7 and Debian bash-completion version 20080705.
The figures are averages over 100 tests.

Bash 3.2, without bash malloc:
 * eval `dircolors`: 0.636s
 * source /etc/bash_completion: 0.721s

Bash 4.0, with bash malloc:
 * eval `dircolors`: 0.385s
 * source /etc/bash_completion: 41.651s (around 93% of the time is spent in
function find_entry of lib/malloc/table.c)

Bash 4.0, without bash malloc:
 * eval `dircolors`: 0.132s
 * source /etc/bash_completion: 0.703s

We notice that on my computer, libc6's malloc is definitively faster than
Bash's malloc.
More interesting is the fact that the various improvements to command
substitution have dramatically reduced its execution time (eval `dircolors`
is now 4.8 times faster!).

Thank you very much for this wonderful new version of Bash!
Nicolas